Wager with the Wind: The Don Sheldon Story

Introduction

The story of Alaskan bush aviation is not an old one. It began on July 4, 1913, when the tiny log-cabin settlement of Fairbanks saw the first airplane to fly in Alaska take to the sky. Billed as The Aerial Circus, James Martin was hired to travel north from Seattle, and when the wheels of his tractor biplane rose above the dust of the ballpark, the townsfolk cheered from nearby sod rooftops. Ten years later, a quiet North Dakota schoolteacher named Carl Ben Eielson, who had arrived in the frontier town in 1922, took off from the same ballpark Martin had used, to begin a flying career that would take him where the airplane had no reason to be.

During the late twenties, there were no roads in the Territory of Alaska, and the Alcan Highway would not be built until the war years of the forties. Alaska was a distant place believed to be populated by igloo-dwelling sourdoughs who spent each passing season of the year in the dark clutches of a never-ending snowstorm. Even in the light of Eielson’s considerable efforts, the resident population of the continental United States, a place that Alaskans would someday refer to as the South 48, stood firm in the belief that Alaska would remain a place best described as a refrigerated wasteland, and yes, the folly of a man named William Seward.

With Eielson breaking trail across the boundless skies of a land that had never heard the drone of an aircraft engine, others followed. Noel Wien, Joe Crosson, Fred Moller, Harold Gillam, and Bob Reeve—men who shared the quiet schoolteacher’s boundless optimism in the future of Alaska—would become legends in their own time.

There have been countless thousands of words written about these early bush pilots, and almost without exception, these stories have created a universal image of reckless derring-do in an untamed land. It is true that the challenge of Alaska had motivated these early airmen. However, what made them tick was their simple faith that their flimsy wire-strung machines represented the key to the Pandora’s box called the Territory of Alaska. Proof of this faith is easily found in the fact that those hearty individuals who survived bush aviation’s infant years went on, almost to a man, to concentrate their efforts on the formal development of aviation in the Far North.

Eielson spent the last years of his young life in pursuit of a dream that called for a network of airlines through Alaska to Asia and Europe. Noel Wien and his brothers would later found the prestigious Wien Airlines (now Wien Air Alaska, Inc.), a firm that is still one of Alaska’s largest carriers, while Gillam, using his uncanny ability to understand and cope with the Territory’s fickle weather, opened the way for the development of early navigational aids. And finally, there was the dynamic Bob Reeve who founded Reeve Aleutian Airways, still a highly successful carrier in both Alaska and Canada.

When Eielson, Crosson, and the others came to Alaska, Don Sheldon was a stringy youngster with his own personal dream. Like Eielson, the Wien brothers, Crosson, and Reeve, he grew up during the predepression years in an environment of self-sufficiency that seemed to breed Alaska’s early fliers. Like them also, he was reared in the north-central states. Sheldon, however, came to the Territory searching not for a place to fly an airplane, because he did not yet know how to fly, but simply for a place in which he would be free to choose his own way.

He watched the arrivals and departures of these early aviators during his first season in the north, and because going by airplane was better than beating yourself to death on a pair of snowshoes, he quickly learned to fly. To those hearty souls who have traveled on foot in the endless snow of a winter in the interior of Alaska, the logic in this succinct statement is not only obvious but sufficient, and those who understand the wide spectrum of reasons that make men fly airplanes can easily read between the lines.

Unlike most of the original drivers of bush aircraft, Sheldon learned his basic trade in Alaska, and like many others before him, he has gone on to become a highly specialized bush pilot. During his colorful flying career, he has seen vast changes in the Territory. Where at one time the sight of a single airplane made everyone’s day, air service now is available to the most remote village. This development occurred at a phenomenal rate. In order to indulge in what he now refers to as his specialty, Sheldon was early forced into the role of shrewd competitor in the ever-marginal business of general-charter aviation. And while many other pilots failed, he not only survived but excelled. Talkeetna Air Service has long been one of the most successful ventures of its kind. The reason it has flourished is that Sheldon, now 53 years old, is one of only a handful of the world’s pilots who make high-risk mountain flying a full-time, everyday vocation.

The events which have occurred in the 36 years since he came to Alaska and which have contributed to Sheldon’s undisputed rank among airmen the world over are far too numerous to be contained between the covers of any single book. This fact has necessitated limiting the selection of incidents to highlights that best describe this man—what he has done and what he continues to do. It is my most sincere hope that Don Sheldon, my close friend and a highly unique individual, will become familiar to all who read his fascinating story. It is the story not only of Sheldon the aviator but of flying in Alaska’s great mountains, especially Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak and a place that he calls his own.

A Step And A Half

The mountain, 60 miles northwest of where he stood on his dirt airstrip in Talkeetna, always gave him a clue to the approaching weather. On this Christmas day of 1958, he could see from the cloud layers building up around the mountain that a storm was brewing. More than any other man alive, Donald Edward Sheldon knows Mount McKinley—its soul-inspiring beauty and its basic savagery. He understands the lure of the mountain, called Denali by the Athabascan Indians, and respects the almost unparalleled mental and physical stamina needed to meet the challenge of this forbidding giant. Sheldon’s love affair with this monolith of a forgotten Ice Age began with his first sight of North America’s tallest mountain, rising 20,320 feet above Alaska’s spruce-cloaked interior. She has been his mistress ever since.

The brisk wind tugged at his clothes and banged the sliding hangar doors. Snow blown off the roof swirled around him. Sheldon was glad he had hangared four of his planes before the blizzard could begin. As he stepped inside to check his schedule for the day, he heard the jangling of the phone barely rising above the noise of the wind. It was a dispatcher from Tenth Rescue Division at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage.

The news the dispatcher gave Sheldon was anything but good. A huge military C-54 transport was overdue. It had left Anchorage the day before en route for Shemya, in the Aleutian Islands, but it never got there. Radio contact had been lost after the big plane —carrying passengers, Christmas packages, and the payroll for the troops at Shemya Air Force Base—called a position report 100 miles southwest of Anchorage. At the time of the last report, the plane had been flying in heavily overcast weather.

The Alaska Peninsula spawns a system of foul weather that has affected the entire history of Alaskan aviation. In the early forties, during the Second World War, both the Japanese and American war machines were hard pressed to cope with it, and Dutch Harbor became a word that most GIs and military tacticians would like to forget—permanently. The long string of tiny treeless islands, with names like Attu, Umnak, Atka, and the Rats, are strung out from the peninsula into the vastness of the North Pacific, where they are steeped continually in the heavy fog, wind, and zero-zero overcast for which such maritime environments are notorious. The weather does not get much better as it approaches the base of the peninsula near Port Moller and Cold Bay.

Tenth Rescue didn’t initiate a search because of the weather, and the guy asked me if I’d be interested, to which I said, ‘You bet!’ After I hung up, I looked at the weather south of town, and I knew that this wouldn’t be any lark, ’cause she was stacked up like sour biscuit dough as far as I could see, which wasn’t very far.

Into the Super Cub’s boot, Sheldon loaded cans containing four extra hours of gasoline, a pair of snowshoes, and his survival gear, which as always was packed into a big red nylon bag that closely resembles a fat sausage. He had decided to begin his search somewhere in the north quadrant of Mount Iliamna, a 10,016-foot active (smoking) volcano, 180 miles south of Talkeetna. The peak is on a direct airway to Shemya and 1,200 miles to the northeast.

After topping off his wing tanks and slipping into his parka and felt-lined overshoes, he took off to the south and set a course that would take him over the braided and frozen Susitna River to Cook Inlet. Once there, he planned to follow the coastal flats to the vicinity of Tyonek and Trading Bay. This course would place him just a short hop from Iliamna.

Tenth Rescue had told me that they had layered clouds in the vicinity of Iliamna, and man they weren’t kiddin’. It looked like a milk shake, and the trip down had been like the old roller coaster. I had just recently installed a powerful HF radio in the airplane, and I figured that I could call New York City on 3411 if I had to. Right now, I was busy just lookin’ for a place to start lookin’.

The tiny Super Cub, 7163 Delta, jumped like a scalded cat as Sheldon closed with the base of Iliamna. Looking for a break in the low ceiling, he flew south to the vicinity of Iniskin Bay.

I noticed right off when I got to Iniskin that the wind, which was blasting out of the south, was thinning the cloud deck on that side of the mountain, but the north side was a swirling mass of snow, pushed by a wind that I estimated to be blowing at about 30 to 40 knots.

Sheldon now had to play what cards he had or get out of the game. Once on the north side of Iliamna, there would be no room for even a carelessly drawn breath, because low-level flight along the slopes of any mountain is risky when there is high wind and little visibility.

"I got as low as I could after I ducked into the clouds, and like I figured, couldn’t see a thing except occasional snow and rocks. I could smell the stinking sulfur fumes from the volcano rifts as I got downwind of ’em through the cracks in the Cub’s door, and it was a bad scene. Each time I punched a hole in the low clouds, I hoped they weren’t stuffed with rocks.

In a deal like this one, all you can do is follow your hunches, and you’ll last longer—unless, of course, they turn out to be wrong. The hunch I had told me first that they were on the north side of the mountain, and then it said to look higher. I had the growing feeling that if I could only get to 8,500 or 9,000 feet, I’d find something. At this point, the wind is rippin’ and tearin’, and I’d been in the overcast for about half an hour. I started to look for a hole to go up through.

During his entire career, Sheldon has been a firm believer in what he casually calls good hunches, and he was willing to play his hunches here on the jagged slopes of a mountain that was, for the most part, unfamiliar to him. On McKinley, he has come to know the mountain so intimately that he can get but a momentary glimpse of rock and ice and know exactly where he is and in which direction he is traveling, but not here.

I was headed north and climbing, and in the process of making a turn to the left. I had just about made up my mind for the 8th time that I’d never get to nine grand [9,000 feet] when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something that made my old ticker stand still. There she lay, and would you believe—the transport was scattered for half a mile.

Sheldon swung the Super Cub in a dangerously steep bank to negate the chance of losing the site of the crash. On his first return pass, he thought he could see numbers, but he needed to get closer.

The damned scud and sulfur fumes, which smelled like rotten eggs, were streaming across my line of vision, and the Cub was bouncing up and down in the turbulence. The numbers of the plane were on the tail fin, and because of their size, I ended up readin’ ’em on my 7th pass at 50 feet of altitude.

Sheldon hastily jotted the registry of the plane on a scrap of brown paper as he climbed away from the grisly scene. During the course of the seven on-the-deck sweeps he had made over the broken plane, death had been but a single moderate downdraft away.

I pulled out over the ocean on the south side and gave Elmendorf a holler on 3411, and they came in like the guy was sittin’ next to me.

Ah, Roger 63 Delta, go ahead, said a calm military voice.

I say, ‘Hey, are these numbers correct?’ and then I read ’em off.

The military voice verified the plane’s registry. Sheldon hauled anchor and landed on the beach in a wind-sheltered cove near Trading Bay only long enough to dump the red 80-octane gas he carried through the chamois-skin strainer and stretch his cramped legs. Then it was back to Talkeetna for a Christmas turkey and a game of poker at the Bucket of Blood Bar.

Sheldon received a special citation from the U.S. Air Force for his efforts in finding the lost plane.

An interesting incident closely related to his location of the C-54 would occur six years later. He was asked by an amateur treasure hunter from the Talkeetna area to take him to Mount Iliamna to look for base metals.

I hauled this guy, along with 2,000 pounds of gear, down there in the ski plane, and when I finally got him landed, I suddenly realized we were at 8,250 feet, just 2 miles west of the snow-buried site of the 1958 disaster. The military had, of course, put the place off limits and listed it as an unrecoverable disaster. This was six years later, and the off limits designation wouldn’t be removed till the following year. My flesh crawled when it suddenly dawned on me what this dude had in mind. I walked up to the guy and said, ‘If you plan to salvage the valuables from that C-54, mister, you’re going to do it over my dead body, and you got just 20 more seconds to get your butt into this here Cub, or I’m headed for Elmendorf.’

Sheldon knew that in addition to the personal effects that lay beneath the snow, the payroll for the military installation at Shemya was still there too.

We almost had a knockdown battle right there on the side of old Iliamna before the guy thought better of it and hopped into the Cub. He sulked as I took him back to Talkeetna, and after back-hauling all that gear, I figured here was one trip I’d never collect for, but I was wrong. He paid off later, but since that day to this, I’m definitely not on his list of favorite speaking acquaintances.

From the flickering shadow of a tiny airplane on the rugged granite face of a remote mountain to the momentary darkness of spring clouds racing over an endless sea of bunchgrass prairie is an effortless shift in time for one who remembers well.

Donald Edward Sheldon was born in Mt. Morrison, Colorado, on November 21, 1921. In 1923, the family moved to Wyoming.

Sheldon’s world then consisted of a small ranch—a few hundred acres owned by his father—and the surrounding federal lands that were leased to the ranchers to provide grass for their cattle. The grazing lands always seemed to renew themselves as if by magic, or so it seemed to young Sheldon. A sudden rainstorm would drench the red earth and renew the bunchgrass that had shriveled during a hot, dry summer. Water, dammed and held in reservoirs much as it is today, was readily available. A comfortable but unstable self-sufficiency prevailed.

This place was near the great Red Desert in the sovereign state of Wyoming, Sheldon explains, and the nearby settlement of Lander straddled the still-evident ruts of the old Oregon Trail that wound through South Pass. School was five long miles on horseback for me and my older sister.

Sheldon recalls his early life in a series of sharp, though often detached, impressions that almost exactly mirror his unique personality as a man—the undulating prairie grass; the musk of newly turned sod; the weathered ranch buildings content in their declining years to shelter a rancher, his wife, and their two children; and above all, the exciting plethora of wildlife. Smiling in his disarming fashion, Sheldon recalls the flash of white antelope rumps and the heavy prairie chickens that were a delight to behold both on the wing and on the black iron wood stove as they cooked to tender goodness. Sheldon’s consummate interest in the big-game animals of Alaska—the moose, caribou, and the giant shuffling grizzly bear—is the perfect counterpart of his childhood fascination with elk, bison, and bighorn sheep. His interest, now as then, transcends the ordinary and zeroes in on the habits of the animals—how they survive, where they spend their lives, and how they can be approached. On the plains and in the mountains of Wyoming, he was training in the best, and perhaps least expensive, school of all to become a self-made naturalist, and at the same time, was cultivating a deep and abiding respect for the basic forces that shape our environment. Even during these early years, the lad was always influenced by the relentless natural force of the weather, which would regulate and almost define his adulthood—the driving snowstorms of winter and early spring; the hot, dry, grass-scorching summers; and the violent winds that would become his constant companion and adversary in his final chosen vocation. To Sheldon the bush pilot, the marrow-chilling cold on the high mountains of Alaska would be little different from the cold he remembers as a boy when he and his older sister, Berniece, became trapped in a gale-force blizzard en route to the small country schoolhouse five miles from their ranch.

Like other boys of similar places and times, Sheldon learned to ride, and he vividly remembers the throbbing scrapes and bruises left by unyielding rocks after a fall from the back of a skittish horse that had been panicked by the flashing rump patches of a jumping band of pronghorns. The horse was the only available means of transportation for young Sheldon, and riding required confidence and considerable personal skill. Perhaps one might speculate that his almost total reliance upon the airplanes he flies today found early root here.

Ranch work was hard and bone wearying for the boy. The gathering and storing of the neck-prickling hay that would forestall hunger for the livestock during the winter and the harvesting of three complete crops of alfalfa during the summer and early autumn made for a never-ending cycle of labor. Blisters of spring turned to calluses of summer, and young stringy muscles became wiry and hard during school vacations spent learning to earn a living from the